Re: Re: "Drivers? We don't need no stinking..."

On Wed, Mar 26, 2003 at 10:43:15AM -0800, Kendall Bennett wrote:
> Sven Luther <[email protected]> wrote:
> 
> > > Vote with your dollars. If you are committed to the Open Source-only path,
> > > the don't by hardware from vendors that don't release docs. This has worked
> > > in the past, rarely.
> > 
> > Well, but not these days anymore, what would you end buying ?
> > Nvidia is out, matrox was giving docs in the past, but with the new
> > hardware (parhelia), i think there are not so open anymore, true,
> > who would buy a parhelia, but still. ATI does release docs, but
> > they don't release all of them too, especially in the Video domain.
> > I don't really know about the others, but none release docs without
> > you signing an NDA (BTW, are all the docs you offered NDA clean ?),
> > and anyway, often you cannot even buy their hardware. 
> 
> There is actually a really good reason for this. The hardware vendors 
> like ATI listened to the Open Source community and made a genuine attempt 
> at fitting into the Open Source model. The paid to have Open Source 
> drivers developed for the Linux platform (full 3D drivers, not just 2D 
> ones) and has the full source code released to the community. They also 
> made the specs for that generation of hardware available for the Open 
> Source community as well. What did they get in return? A bunch of free 

What did they get in return ? I bought a Radeon 9000 for my spare box,
which i would _not_ have bought if there was no open source drivers. And
the fact that most DRI developpment is done on ATI hardware, is a big
plus for them, i guess most people buying video hardware for a linux box
(and thinking about 3D) will know this and buy their card.

> software zealots constantly complaining that "this doesn't work" or 
> "please add this feature" or "I think you should be doing this". Their 
> responses was "you have the source and specs now, go and do it 
> yourself!". In the end they essentially had almost nobody in the Linux 

Well, there is still no motion compensation and IDCT stuff for ATI, and
as a result people running a bit older ibook models cannot view good
quality DVDs while this is no problem for MacOS X, and all the TV-out
things seem to be i386 only. 

So, if we trully had the sources for this, fine, we would write the
drivers, but that is not the case.

Friendly,

Sven Luther